André’s fingers were killing him at the end of the day, but after he was done playing guitar he got behind the microphone and laid down the final tracks for Joséphine by singing harmonies on the song.

Here’s a video of André laying down tracks in Studio B:

As I might have written previously, we had no idea what kind of time-consuming suck-monster the song ‘Confused’ was going to be when we decided that it would be our first song out the door. Dave had to repair a lot problems with the recording through the previous months. A few weeks ago, Dave finished editing Dmitri’s rhythm guitar part and everyone agreed that it was a phenomenal performance and sounded fantastic.

But when Dave and I sat down and listened to the whole song with the new guitars, it was quickly evident that there was something..not..right. Turns out that the original bass line that I put down 6 months ago no longer works with the new guitars. Seeing as the new guitars sounded great and I felt that it was easier to just re-record a new bass line, I plugged in and thought to myself: “This should be recorded, edited and finished within the hour. Boy was I wrong.

Turns out that the rhythm the Dima was playing was so foreign to what I was used to, I never did get the part correct that night. We ended up having to come back the following week and lay the bass down in pieces and sections. It was quite a challenge, but I do love diving into uncharted musical territory.

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Speaking of challenges, a couple of weeks ago, we went into the studio with no ideas and challenged ourselves to write songs in different musical genres. Dave said he wanted to write an ’80′s pop song’. OK, so we started writing what we thought an 80′s pop song would sound like.

About half-way through the session, we stop and Dave gives André a Pro Tools training session. The two of them sit down together and André learns how to record a drum beat. After that, he records some guitar. Then Dave shows him how to edit the parts together to make a song. After everything was done, André came up with a pretty catchy little pop tune. We bounced it to disk and took it home with us.

The next night, I wrote some words and André liked them, so we dropped everything else we were doing in the studio and started working on André’s song.

Last night we came in with a bunch of new ideas for the song, and keeping with the spirit of the original recording André recorded every single instrument. We had the poor man on a tambourine for an hour and his arm was killing him. We are all pretty happy with the results so far. Hopefully we can get all the pieces together soon and post it on the website for you all.

On the 7th of February, André, Dave and I went into the studio to play freeform and jam. See what comes out. Dave played a couple of old unfinished songs of his that André and I had heard for the first time.

Normally after we practice or record, I take a copy of the work and drop it into my iTunes, slap it into my iPod and then spend the weeks listening to the work over and over to see what the hell is wrong or to write with. In the case of Dave’s two songs, I was fixated with a song called “Faded White”. I would play it over and over. Keep in mind that the recorded track that I had was only Dave’s guitar, my bass and André’s drums. There were no vocals and Dave didn’t sing any during the session.

After about 6 weeks of listening to the song, I asked Dave if it would be alright for me to try to take a stab at writing some words for his song. He graciously said that he didn’t mind and that he has some half-finished words for it already. The plan was that I would write what I was hearing in my head, play it for Dave and then he would play what he originally wrote and then let him figure out what he wants to do with all of the material.

I figured that it would be a good exercise for myself to take someone else’s song and title and with nothing else, try to paint a (hopefully) catchy melody and lyrics on top of it. I thought I could do it, but wasn’t able to commit the time needed to write until Monday night.

I spent all evening writing while André made 5 gallons of a German Alt Bier in the kitchen (along with playing drums in Socialized and the Slick Johnson Snowman Expedition, André is also a damn fine brewer). The next night (last night) I quickly double-tracked some vocals of questionable pitch on top of the original recording. At midnight last night I sent it off to Dave and let the chips fall where they may.

As of right now, I’m happy with the chorus melodies and some of the words in the choruses. However, I am disappointed in the verses and not that thrilled by either of the two vocal melodies that I wrote for the verses. I went into this experiment convinced that I was going to hit one out of the park. That I was going to write the best words that I’ve ever written. I discovered that I wrote something that’s OK and considerably short of ‘out of the park’. Disappointing, but illustrative.

On March 20th, Dave, André and I were in the studio and were doing another freeform jam. We wanted to stumble onto something that could be working into a song. We jammed for about 2.5 hours with absolutely nothing coming out of it and I for one was frustrated. I instinctively felt that there was a song dying to come out, but we were playing shit.

Suddenly, Dave started playing a riff that triggered something in us. We started shaping it and a melody started to arise. Dave quickly grabbed a mic and we all hummed the melody into the mic. That was the end of the session.

Last week, the 27th, we went back in to the studio and Dave chopped up all of the relevant parts to the song. André then worked with the different parts and arranged the song properly. After that, we all recorded new parts following André’s arrangement. Bing! We had something.

André is working on words and we plan to go back into the studio on Thursday to demo out, hopefully, a brand new song.

All of our songs get working titles until the words are written and this one is no different. We’ve dubbed the instrumental track ‘Milkshake’.

We listened to a few of the drum tracks that were recorded the previous week and realized that the demos that André was playing to were not very good. We scrapped the new drum tracks that he recorded and started again this weekend from scratch.

André took it all in stride and didn’t complain at all. In fact, he said that he was happy to get the practice in. What a pal.

Dave, & I set up outside of the drum room (Now named ‘Studio B’) with an acoustic guitar, bass and mic and we warbled out the songs while Dré crashed away.

We recut the drums on Joséphine and one other of the songs that we previously tracked, Clarity. Clarity has a number of tempo and time signature changes that makes playing along with a demo and/or a click track problematic. We scrapped the demo and the click and just played the song the way it was intended to be done. Hopefully it won’t be too difficult to edit or overdub without the click. We’ll find out soon. We’re hoping to finish and release it in March but that might prove to be a bit ambitious.

While we were fixing the two songs from last week’s session, we snuck in a new song, bringing the total to 6 drum tracks for 6 songs. We have 11 songs from the set list that could be tracked and a total of 21~22 original songs to cull from. We would like to get 2 or 3 more drum tracks in the can before moving on to mixing the next song to be released: Confused.